28.5% of job postings now ask for AI skills. We analyzed 558,596 live job ads.

AI skill demand by profession

The stereotype says AI requirements live in engineering job ads. The data says marketing, design, security, and product management are just as saturated — and the professions with the least AI language (healthcare, science, construction) are regulated or physical fields where tooling changes reach job ads last.

Professions with at least 4,000 active postings. “AI skills mention” defined in the methodology below.

The seniority twist: AI is a senior-level requirement

The common worry is that AI erodes entry-level work. Job ads tell a sharper story: employers expect senior people to wield AI. A senior individual-contributor posting is three times more likely to mention AI skills than an entry-level one. Judgment plus AI leverage is what the market is pricing, and employers appear unwilling to trust that leverage to people who haven’t built the judgment yet.

Which AI tools do employers name?

Most postings ask for AI skills generically, but when employers name tools, ChatGPT leads — and Claude has nearly closed the gap. Mentions of either dwarf every other tool.

Literal mentions of the tool or its maker in posting text. 86% of Claude mentions co-occur with explicit AI context within 200 characters; the remainder are overwhelmingly technical postings as well.

Salary transparency: remote employers show their numbers

41.9% of active postings publish a salary band. The split by work mode is the interesting part: employers hiring remotely — who compete across state and national lines — disclose pay far more often than on-site employers who compete only with the businesses down the road.

The remote-work map, mid-2026

Fully-remote listings are now 15.9% of postings with a known work mode (on-site: 48.0%, hybrid: 36.1%). Remote work concentrated into a handful of professions rather than disappearing:

Median posted salary by profession

Among USD postings that disclose a band, the median midpoint by profession (in thousands):

Median of (min+max)/2 for USD bands between $10K and $2M; professions with at least 200 disclosed USD bands.

Methodology

JobLobster maintains a live index of job postings pulled directly from public employer applicant-tracking-system feeds (Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, Workday and others) — primary-source ads, not scraped aggregator copies. This study covers all 558,596 postings active in the corpus during the first week of July 2026; 492,144 with complete description text were scanned for AI-skill language. A posting counts as mentioning AI skills if its text includes generative AI, artificial intelligence, standalone “AI”, AI-powered tooling, LLMs / large language models, or prompt engineering; classic “machine learning” alone is excluded (it adds just 0.7 points). Professions and seniority come from JobLobster’s deterministic role classifier. Salary figures use only postings that disclose numeric bands. The corpus skews toward North American professional roles; percentages describe this corpus, not the entire global labor market.

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